Zoe Carmina's Blog: Zoe Jane Carmina, page 20

Plan Your Year for Success

Hello lovelies. Welcome back to the blog. Today I want to go over goal setting for the new year. I know Ive gone over this for short term planning before, but I want to give you a way to plan your entire year realistically so that in December of 2021 you can look back and know you accomplished something.

Where do you even start?

Ive talked about this before on the blog, but I like to start my year plan by blocking out the days I know I wont write (vacations, movie and book releases,...

Keeping the Momentum of NaNoWriMo

Hello Lovelies! The month of November is coming to a close, and whether you’ve won NaNoWriMo, are nowhere near winning, or didn’t participate at all, I want you to know I am cheering for you and I hope you finish strong!

What’s the most glorious thing about doing NaNoWriMo? For so many of us out there, we are writing on our lunch breaks We are squeezing words in while we sit at the kiddos baseball practice, or taking that one hour before the day starts to get our words in. If I make 600 words...

Find Your Writing Flow State

Writing without abandon. Who can do such a thing these days? To answer the question, YOU.

Hello Lovelies, and welcome back to the blog. Today I want to talk about the mythical unicorn that is a flow state, how to find yours, and why it will help your writing.

First of all, you might be wondering, what is a Flow State? According to Wikipedia, a flow state is one in which “a person performing some activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the proc...

Four Free Ways to Support Fellow Authors

Hello Lovelies, and welcome back to the blog. It’s the end of week two for NaNoWriMo and probably most authors are starting to feel the burn. As in times before, in week two, I am in the muddy middle of my draft. The writing usually becomes a slog for me, and the burst of energy I feel at the start of something new fades away as burnout becomes an ever more likely scenario.

It is in this kind of place where I am at my lowest as a writer, and for this reason, I wanted to talk about a few fre...

Build a Writing Community

Hello Lovelies, and welcome back to the blog. We are at the end of the first week of NaNoWriMo and I am keeping a double pace so far. Whether you are writing novels this November or not, one of the things I most enjoy about doing NaNoWriMo is the sense of community you get when doing this crazy challenge.

So let’s explore the idea of creating your own writing community. First, I want to give you ideas for places to look for an existing community, then we’ll talk about what to do if no communi...

Word Count Tracker for 2021 (+ Bonuses)

Hello Lovelies! I have a new free form for you to use. Back in 2014 I was looking for a way to chronicle my writing journey and to quantify how much work I was getting done in my writing. I made a super basic word count tracker, and used it for about five years. Then, I decided my basic, ugly word count tracker wasn’t easy to copy from year to year and didn’t differentiate between the types of writing projects I was completing.

So I set out to completely redesign my word count tracker from th...

NaNoWriMo and the Planner, Pantser, Plantser Model

“I think there are two types of writers, the architects and the gardeners. The architects plan everything ahead of time, like an architect building a house. They know how many rooms are going to be in the house, what kind of roof they’re going to have, where the wires are going to run, what kind of plumbing there’s going to be. They have the whole thing designed and blueprinted out before they even nail the first board up. The gardeners dig a hole, drop in a seed and water it. They kind of know ...

NaNoWriMo FAQ’s

Hello Lovelies! Welcome back to the blog.

Today I want to give you a little more information on NaNoWriMo in case last week’s blog post got you interested. We’ll be going over some of the Frequently Asked Questions, and for transparency sake, I am copying this all directly off the NaNoWriMo website. I do not own these words or this content in any way, nor am I making any money off of telling you about NaNo and its affiliates.

I love participating in NaNoWriMo, and if you’re interested but...

NaNoWriMo. What’s the Hype About?

Hey lovelies, you’ve heard of NaNoWriMo by now, right? If you haven’t participated or have heard it being tossed around in the writing community but have no clue what it is, I got you, sib. This post starts the first in a series of posts for what we like to call the crazy prep month before November, also known as #PrepTober.

What is it?

So what is NaNoWriMo anyway? Well, November is designated as the National Novel Writing Month. In their own words,

“National Novel Writing Month began...

Intro to Kanban Boards and Digital Trello Kanban Boards

Well hello, Lovelies! Here we are in Q4 of 2020. It’s gone by too fast, hasn’t it? It’s time to set some new goals so that I can accomplish ALL THE THINGS!

As with other quarters I use a Kanban-style Trello Board for all my goal setting. If all of that is gibberish to you, let me explain.

Kanban is a Japanese word and it means “signboard” in English. This type of board aims to provide a visual representation of the workload and a capacity measurement for how much work in each category ca...